Morman

Introduction
System Requirements
Morman menu
Sheet menu
Thumbnail menu
Inadequacies
"And it's called 'Morman' because...?"

Introduction

Morman is a simple little utility that helps you create contact sheets of your picture collection. It seemed like it might be sort of useful at the time. Basically, you just drag image files from the tracker into a Morman window. It generates a thumbnail which you can position by dragging it around in the window.

System Requirements

Morman requires BeOS PR2 or later and a compatible version Jon Watte's DataTypes library. It's my understanding that (a descendant of) this library will become part of the standard BeOS install, but for now you have to do it yourself. It should work fine even on 2x66 BeBoxen, but I haven't actually tested on anything slower than the 2x133.

Morman menu

The Morman menu contains commands that are relevant to the general operation of the program itself.

About Morman: Shows a minimal about box.
New Sheet: Creates a new, empty contact sheet.
Open Sheet...: Shows an open dialog so you can open a contact sheet which you have previously saved. You can also drop contact sheet files on the application icon or double-click them.
Quit: Closes all Morman windows and (if I did it right) removes all vestiges of it from memory. The computer's; not yours.

Sheet menu

The commands in the Sheet menu operate on the current contact sheet.

Get Info: This command shows a window containing a list of the pictures represented in the contact sheet. The list is sorted lexically, so you can see if you have unintentional duplicates.
Set Extents...: Allows you s\to specify how large the contact sheet is. If you generate an image, any thumbnails that don't fit in the area you specified will be cropped or lost completely.
Show Edges: Draws a grey rectangle indicating the extents of the contact sheet so you don't unintentionally crop thumbnails.
Save: Saves the contact sheet (which is primarily stored as a collection of pathnames). If you haven't already saved, you'll get a save dialog so you can specify the name.
Save As...: Lets you specify where to save the contact sheet (and then does it).
Export Image...: Generates a contact sheet image. This is the really cool feature. You get a standard save dialog to tell Morman where to save your image, and under what name. Nothing exciting there, except.... The dialog has a Format menu which allows you to choose how the image is saved. The format menu shows the name and MIME type for every graphic format available on your system via DataTypes translation. When you save, Morman also generates a text file containing an almost-complete client-side HTML image map.

Thumbnail menu

The commands in the Thumbnail menu are all relevant to the thumbnails in the current contact sheet. Those commands that act on a single thumbnail are available in a context menu by right-clicking on an individual thumbnail.

Get Info: Shows a window containing the path and area for the current selection.
Delete: Removes the current selection from the contact sheet. The file is not deleted from your system.
Bring To Front: Moves the current selection to the top of the set of images. Generally I think it's unlikely that you'll want overlapping, but if you do....
Send To Back: Moves the current selection to the bottom of the set of images.
Set Default Size...: Allows you to specify the size of the box which images are scaled to fit into. When you generate a new thumbnail, it will be no larger than the size given here, but the aspect ratio of the original image is maintained so it may be smaller in one dimension.

Inadequacies

Following is a list of known shortcomings in the current release of Morman. I'm aware of them and intend to address them, but I don't consider them crippling.

Thumbnails cannot be dragged between Morman windows.
Images dropped on the application icon don't generate a new contact sheet containing those images.
Thumbnails cannot be resized.
The current selection isn't indicated visually.
No command-line handling.

Go ahead and write if you think there's something else missing. I do intend to keep working on Morman, but please be aware that it was largely a diversion from another project. Until that's done, non-critical issues in Morman are free-time projects.

"And it's called 'Morman' because...?"

It's a play on words. There's an American author named Norman Mailer. Since this is a utility to work with image thumbnails (a 'Nailer' if you will) I called it Morman. Sort of like having a Honda and refering to it as "Fenry." I knew I guy who called his Ford pickup "Robert." It was a red Ford. You get the picture.

The above does not constitute an endorsement of Ford, Honda, or Norman Mailer.

Morman is a trademark of Gregory Weston
BeBox and BeOS are trademarks of Be, Inc.
Other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective holders.

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